In case if you have not heard, Haruki Murakami is out with his new book ‘Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.’ This is Murakami’s first long novel in the past three years since last releasing his widely acclaimed book ‘1Q84,’ which I absolutely adore as have reviewed in previous entries.

As a self-professed Murakami fan who went on my little ‘Murakami literary pilgrimage’ when I went to Tokyo (Click here for pictures), this is certainly one of the most exciting literary news I have heard in awhile.

And I know I am not in this alone. There was much hype surrounding the book prior to its release on April 12, with Asahi Shimbun reporting that a major Japanese publishing house has prepared 500 000 copies “in anticipation of high demand for Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, breaking the record of any first printing by the publisher.”

A good writer has a good ear, he/she can hear the unique ways different speak, how they talk, how they breathe, how they pause.

August Wilson (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Quiz of the day: where is this amazing monologue from?

Rose, I done tried all my life to live decent . . . to live a clean . . . hard . . . useful life. I tried to be a good husband to you. In every way I knew how. Maybe I come into the world backwards, I don’t know. But . . . you born with two strikes on you before you come to the plate. You got to guard it closely . always looking for the curve ball on the inside corner. You can’t afford to let none get past you. You can’t afford a call strike. If you going down. . . you going down swinging. Everything lined up against you. What you gonna do? I fooled them, Rose. I bunted. When I found you and Cory and a halfway decent job. I was safe. Couldn’t nothing touch me. I wasn’t gonna strike out no more. I wasn’t going back to the penitentiary. I wasn’t gonna lay in the streets with a bottle of wine. I was safe. I had me a family. A job. I wasn’t gonna get that last strike. I was on first looking for one of them boys to knock me in. To get me home.

Marathon Monday usually marks the first day of the year that I pick up a tennis racket again. The first game of the year is always highly amusing. The body cannot believe that it has to move around again after a whole winter of comfortably situated in warm layers of clothes. The shot seems absurd and the movements of the body seems a savage violation of the peace and harmony it has achieved over a whole winter of doing nothing.

The classification of finite simple groups (CFSG), first announced in 1983 but only fully completed in 2004, is one of the monumental achievements of twentieth century mathematics. Spanning hundreds of papers and tens of thousands of pages, it has been called the “enormous theorem”. A “second generation” proof of the theorem is nearly completed which is a little shorter (estimated at about five thousand pages in length), but currently there is no reasonably sized proof of the classification.

An important precursor of the CFSG is the Feit-Thompson theorem from 1962-1963, which asserts that every finite group of odd order is solvable, or equivalently that every non-abelian finite simple group has even order. This is an immediate consequence of CFSG, and conversely the Feit-Thompson theorem is an essential starting point in the proof of the classification, since it allows one to reduce matters to groups of even order for which key…